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Terminology used in design process is being used so loosely that sometimes it is very confusing to differentiate the phases of the process.

(1) While it might seem innocent enough, referring to a mockup as a wireframe is like a carpenter referring to a hammer as a screwdriver.

So the first thing is that there are three phases of design process i.e. Wireframes, Mockups and Prototype.

Wireframes:

Wireframes are created in early step of the process, it’s like blueprint of design scheme. Most of the time spent during wire framing is deciding layout and organization of content, before going for any visual details. It doesn’t mean that wireframes not concern with visuals but you enough details like required space between element, positioning.

The wireframes can be shown to stakeholders who want to see the results early on and thus can reveal potential edit before wasting time developing them further.(1)

(2)Professor Tingbin Tang’s says in his Design classes series at San Jose State University ‘Wireframes are created by user experience professionals called “Interaction Designers” . The interaction designers who have broad backgrounds in visual design, information architecture and user research, create wireframes for the purpose of arranging elements to best accomplish a particular purpose’.

To get deep into Wireframes follow up this video by Kiersten Bonifant, Web Designer at Evolve Creative Group :- levitra professional online

Yisela (Graphic Designer SE) has accurately differentiated between wireframes and mockups. You can read here:

Mockups do for visuals what wireframes do for structure. They represent how the final product should look like. Mockups offers chance of deciding color scheme, typography and styles. As explained

In Guide to Mockups (pharcharmy onlineMockups fill in the visual details that wireframes neglect adding skin to the bones. As visual displays they can be either mid- or high-fidelity, depending on your time and resources.’

The same way that wireframes set aside time to decide structure in the same way mockups set aside time for visuals. Wireframes require viewers to use their imagination, but mockups are much closer to the final product design.

Prototypes:

Giving a product directly into the hands of user without any real interaction and testing is absolutely begging for a failure. Prototyping is the first where we can interact with our product UI and raise usability and other problem if any.

Thus, this makes Prototyping an important phase of design phase and can reduce the chances of product failure.

Source: Google Images

Important Mention: Balasmiq Mockup is a tool used for making ‘Wireframes’, not be confused with the name of software and call wireframes as mockups. As on official site of Balasmiq Mockup also they say it clearly, ‘Balsamiq Mockups is a rapid wire framing tool that helps you Work Faster & Smarter. It reproduces the experience of sketching on a whiteboard, but using a computer’. It can confuse us by the terminology of low-fidelity and high-fidelity mockup, one may consider a high-fidelity wireframe.

This is what Vipor Cipan(CEO UX Passion) says about High-fidelity and Low-fidelity wireframes (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-high-fidelity-and-actual-design). But the fact to keep in mind is that Wireframe and Mockup totally serve different purposes.

How many device models to consider while TESTING?

Are you a mobile application test engineer who often come up with this question?

No worries, let us simplify this using a template.How many models you must test on really depend on the application under test. It is better to analyze and choose an optimum solution that works best within your budget and satisfies your customer’s needs. 1. Listen to your users: Check your user’s pulse, read app reviews if your app is already on Google play. Read your competitor’s app review if required.2. The Application: If you were to test a gaming application, you would simply test it on as many devices as possible ranging from smaller form factors to the largest tablets available. 3. APIs: If the application uses device centric APIs, then test it on as many device models available from the manufacturer on a device from a different manufacturer. 4. Understand the application layout: It will be good to understand how Android handle’s layouts, also gestures or animations supported according to different Android API levels. Take a layout tour while testing the application and test it on all major versions of Android. 5. Data handling: Understand how the application stores data. Also can the app be installed on SD card? If so test it by installing it on SD card and later on Internal storage.

6. Hardware Integration: Does the app depend on inherent hardware components like Camera, Compass, GPS, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Barometer etc…? If so test it on devices that does not support these sensors first and later target on devices with sensors.

7. App Integration:Does the app interact with native party apps like gallery, access SD cards, access phone contacts, dialer, voice dialer, keyboard, access media or does it interact with third party app or services? In the former, testing it on as many devices as possible helps since most of the native apps are tweaked by manufacturers to suit their needs. For example: The way manufacturers may handle contact access differently on different devices.

8. Telephony, data network vs WiFi only devices: Have you ever wondered why an app that installs on the phone does not install on tablets or vice versa? Android applications can be controlled to install on certain type of devices based on whether the telephony services are available or not. It is always a good idea to discuss with the product manager the supported device factors and test based on them.

9. Native binaries:Does the application use NDK binaries? Does the game require binaries based on GPU? Ask your developer if you are not aware of anything that might impact testing across CPU architectures. It is always a good idea to test on x86 based devices apart from ARM.

10. AQuA Guidelines:Read the latest AQuATesting Criteria for ideas before testing an Android app. AQuA provides in-depth insights on testing Mobile applications across devices. To conclude, the template is a starting point to help you decide on the device stack you must create before testing, we do encourage you to think of ideas that could help you come with a custom template. Do feel free to leave your comments below.

I have been asked this question multiple times from various team members, which one to use in the project either SLF4j or LOG4j or both ? Its been long since SLF4j has been in picture and adopted heavily across but certain things never get over. Hence I thought of writing down my answer as a blog itself so others can refer to it from time to time, when needed.

Going back to the question SLF4j or LOG4j ? Here the question itself is wrong. SLF4j and LOG4j focus on different areas and they are not similar components. Please don’t compare them which one is better as they are meant to do two different things.

SLF4j is a logging facade, it doesn’t do logging by itself instead depends on the logging component like LOG4j, Logback or JLogging. SLF4j is an API designed to give generic access to many logging frameworks. So your log code within the application level remains same but the under lying logging framework can be switched without any kind of actual source code changes.

Once you get used to the syntax of SLF4j, then you don’t need to worry about syntax for different logging frameworks. Another major feature of SLF4j which convinced me to use over my long time favourite LOG4j, that is known as placeholder and represented as {} in code. Placeholder is pretty much same as %s in format() method of String, because it get substituted by actual string supplied at runtime. This not only reduce lot of String concatenation in your code, but also cost of creating String object. Since Strings are immutable and they are created in String pool, they consume heap memory and most of the time they are not needed e.g. a String used in DEBUG statement is not needed, when your application is running on ERROR level in production.

By using SLF4j, you can defer String creation at the runtime, which means only required Strings will be created. If you have been using LOG4j then you already familiar with a workaround of putting debug statement inside if() condition, but SLF4j placeholders are much better than that.

You might be thinking what if I have multiple parameters, well you can either use variable arguments version of log methods or pass them as Object array. It’s really convenient and efficient way of logging. Remember, before generating final String for logging the message, this method check if a particular log level is enabled or not, which not only reduce memory consumption but also CPU time involved for executing those String concatenation instruction in advance. It’s also worth knowing that logging has severe impact on performance of the application, and it’s always advised to have only mandatory logging in production environment.

SLF4j provides place holder based logging, which improves readability of code by removing checks like isDebugEnabled(), isInfoEnabled() etc.

By using SLF4j logging method, you defer cost of constructing logging messages (String), which is both memory and CPU efficient.

On a side note, less number of strings means less work for Garbage Collector, which means better throughput and performance for your application.

Using SLF4j in your source will make it independent of any particular logging implementation i.e., no need to manage multiple logging configuration for multiple libraries.

So essentially, SLF4j does not replace LOG4j; they work together hand in hand. It removes the dependency on LOG4j from your application and make it easy to replace it in future with more capable library without any kind of source code changes.

News of the big online retailers revisiting their return policy has made headlines in all the leading business newspaper. And why not, given that one out of five shipments end up in the return bucket. There is considerable cost associated with return products and the last three years has seen a very liberal return policy.

Let’s rewind a little and look at what is online return. Any product which is returned by the customer post placing the order & the shipment leaving the source location is a return and the biggest concern is when the customer returns the product after receiving it.

The cost involved in bring back the product and the ability to put it back as “good inventory” is a nightmare for online retailers. Retailers in general are not alien to the concept of “returns” but the modus operandi of the online retail make return look like a little monster. In offline apparel retail, we have the concept of “Trial room” and the dresses which lie outside the trial room are a type of return. When the same is extrapolated to online return, the customer’s home becomes the trial room and to return the product, it needs to be sent back to the online retailers and this becomes tricky.

Return policy for many online retailers is like a see saw, on one side is the retailer themselves and on other is the customer. It is either perceived as a hassle for the retailer or the customer. A liberal return policy can seem to be a hassle for the retailer whereas a stringent return policy can make the life of a customer difficult. Any tool that is built for the retailer’s convenience at the expense of the customer is bound to fail. Thankfully unlike the egg and chicken situation, we have a silver bullet to nail it.

Returns can be classified as avoidable and unavoidable returns.

Cases like size issue, item not matching will fall under the category of avoidable returns and it makes perfect sense to minimize the avoidable returns, as their existence will have a negative impact on the customer experience. This can be reduced using analytics, improved website experience and disciplined supply chain processes.

It is in handling unavoidable returns like fit issues, malfunctioning products where an organization’s return policy plays a vital role. It is wise to give the benefit of doubt to the customer, though it would be prudent to have category specific return policy in place. The entire return experience should be hassle free, right from placing the return request to the refund /replacement/exchange and returned product reutilization.

It is worth mentioning that return policy can be an effective marketing tool in itself and to a good extent reflects an organization’s customer obsession. Whatever the policy, retailers who understand that return is an inherent characteristic of the online retail business, will go away with the best return gift from the online birthday party.

Often times, performance heavy or resource intensive features bring a Web Application to it’s knees.

How would it work?

There needs to be a mechanism to intelligently turn off features or functionalities depending on their ‘PSR (Performance / Scalability / Reliability) cost’.

Step 1 – Measure

It is essential to weigh each feature set within the Application against their PSR Impact. Loosely this can be done by measuring the resource utilization impact of the specific feature – namely CPU, Memory, Disk and Network I/O’s.

Step 2 – Categorize

Split features into three ‘Categories’ or ‘Buckets’ based on their Performance Weight. Let us for example take ‘Low’, ‘Medium’ and ‘High’ impact categories.

Step 3 – Monitor and Switch

Continually monitor Traffic Usage in Production Environment. Once traffic reaches a known or tested limit (let us say 85% of Peak Capacity) disable ‘High’ and ‘Medium’ performance impact features whereby the Web Application now runs in a light mode consequently only allowing access to core features; thereby preventing downtime and also perhaps enabling reaction time for support teams (for example add additional server capacity to handle the excess load)

You must have used switch cases many times in your Java code. However, the case entry can only be integer or any scalar type. What if the case entries become more flexible? When I say flexible, I mean it to be string, object, primitive data types or combination of all. The other way of doing this is to write a series of if-else-if statements which some times becomes annoying.

It actually helps us to disintegrate a given object, binding it to the values of what it is composed of. This idea is not unique to Scala, but is also there in Haskell, OCaml and Erlang. We can write the above piece of code only because of the existence of something called “Extractors”. Its functionality is somewhat opposite to that of constructor. While constructor creates an object from the given list of parameters, Extractors extracts the parameters from the constructed object. You can relate this with the line:

case Person (name, _, _) => println(name)

Now the question is how does this actually works?

To make a note Scala library already contains some predefined extractors. In the above example we made use of “case” class which automatically creates a companion object that contains apply and unapply methods. The apply method is used to create new instance of the class whereas the unapply method needs to be implemented by an object in order for it to get extracted.

Given below is an example where we define our own unapply method. However, there can be more than one possible signature for unapply method but we will define the one which is commonly used:

Hope this helps you to understand how the pattern matching actually works in Scala and helps you to implement your own extractors based on the usage. As for me it is one of the amazing alternative to IF statements!

long event held at San Francisco, Apple has brought together their ‘ecosystem’ closer than ever. For starters, Apple has renamed the OS X line of operating system to macOS to align with their naming of operating system on other devices (namely iOS, watchOS, tvOS). To add to that, they have now brought Siri to the macOS which bridges the mobile and computer world further together. However, I would like to shift my focus to the major changes brought to the iPhone along with iOS 10 because of its relevance to Blibli.

User Experience Changes.

Apple is known to be a company that priorities user experience more than anything,which is something that has revolutionised the industry. With the new iOS, Apple has shown how much it values user experience by cleaning up their user interface in a number of different places. Besides making camera easily accessible from the lock screen, and raise to wake feature for iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, Apple has redesigned notifications to allow you to do a lot more right from your lock screen. For example, you can use 3D touch to press down on a Calendar notification to Accept, Maybe or Decline on meeting invitations without leaving the lock screen, besides being able to see photos, videos and other rich messages without having to leave the lock screen.

Siri

Besides making Siri available on the Mac as well, Apple has added a whole bunch of new functionality to establish Siri as the best Voice Assistant in the market. Siri now provides third party integration and support which opened up the voice assistant to developers with VoIP, messaging, ride booking, health, photo search and payment applications. You can now simply pick up your phone and tell Siri “Slack my manager than I’m going to be twenty minutes late” if it ever happens to you 😉

Quicktype

Apple has now semi-integrated Siri’s intelligence with the keyboard suggestions to now provide amazing suggestions for responses. For example if you are talking to a friend and your friend asks you for someone’s number, Siri recognises this and offers up that
person’s contact as a suggestion. Furthermore, talking about a lunch or dinner plan allows you to make calendar entries (yes, Siri also checks if you are free at the time) right from the messages app so you do not have to leave your conversation and switch apps to do so.

4.Messages

Admittedly Apple’s messaging has not been able to garner the popularity of WhatsApp
and Facebook Messenger, but it has updated the app to bring it up to the standard and possibly pull up ahead of its competitors in features. First off, emojis can now be enlarged and messages can be ‘emojified’ (I had to put it first, it got the biggest applause in the keynote!). Apple has now opened up messages to third party apps allowing developers to come up with their own stickers that users can paste anywhere in their conversations. Furthermore you can now add effects to messages, so if its a celebratory message, the app behaves the way you’d want it to!

Photos

Photos has gone through a few small but nevertheless cool changes. Photos now provides facial recognition and location detection capabilities. Besides, it also has a separate tab called ‘Memories’. Memories organises your photos and allows you to create beautiful videos with important pictures at the tap of a button. The next time you go for a trip to Nandi Hills with your friends in the weekend and take 500 pictures, all you have to do is tap a button and Apple will automatically create a video with the best photos for you to share with people you know!

Besides all of the changes I’ve discussed above, Apple has also opened up Maps to third parties allowing developers to make ride and restaurant booking apps for Maps without users having to navigate away from the app. Apple Music and Apple News have also gone through a much needed design overhaul to make it easier and cleaner for users. Apple further announced a new application called Home, which allows users to integrate their entire home system to allow users to home systems right from your phone. No more getting out of bed to turn off the lights at night!

While these were the key updates to the new iOS, the new operating system seems more like one that has brought Apple on par in terms of features with it’s competitors. One noteworthy exception is definitely Siri who is now more powerful than ever. With the introduction of Siri to the macOS line, one cannot help but notice how increasingly close Apple has brought the desktop and mobile devices. Apple’s decision to withhold Android support for iMessages was definitely the big miss of the keynote besides hopefuls yearning for Apple’s entry into the VR world. Despite the misses, developers around the world are glad Apple has now begun to rectify their mistakes and open up their apps to third party integration, and the future for Apple definitely looks brighter post the WWDC than before it.

Have you been told told many times, don’t use + operator to concatenate Strings? We know that it is not good for performance. How do you really know whether is it true or not? Do you know what is happening behind the hood? Why don’t we go ahead and explore all about String concatenation?

In the initial versions of java around JDK 1.2 every body used + to concatenate two String literals. Strings are immutable, i.e., a String cannot be modified. Then what happens when we write the following code snippet.

String message = "WE INNOVATE "; message = message + "DIGITAL";

In the above java code snippet for String concatenation, it looks like the String is modified but in reality it is not happening. Until JDK 1.4 the StringBuffer was used internally for concatenation and from JDK 1.5 StringBuilder is used to concatenate. After concatenation the resultant StringBuffer or StringBuilder is changed to String object.

You would have heard from java experts that, “don’t use + operator but use StringBuffer”. If + is going to use StringBuffer internally what big difference it is going to make in String concatenation using + operator?

Look at the following example. I have used both + and StringBuffer as two different cases.

Case 01, I am just using + operator to concatenate.

Case 02, I am changing the String to StringBuffer and then doing the concatenation. Then finally changing it back to String.

I have used a timer to record the time taken for an example of String concatenation.

Look at the output (if you run this java program the result numbers might slightly vary based on your hardware/software configuration). The difference between the two cases is extremely surprising.

You might argue, if + operator is using StringBuffer internally for concatenation, then why is this huge difference in time? Let me explain, when a + operator is used for concatenation see how many steps are involved behind the scenes:

A StringBuffer object is created.

Message is copied to the newly created StringBuffer object.

The “*” is appended to the StringBuffer (concatenation).

The result is converted back to a String object.

The message reference is made to point at that new String.

The old String that message previously referenced is then made null.

Hope you understand the serious performance issues that can result if you use + operator for concatenation. Also, why it is important to use StringBuffer or StringBuilder (from java 1.5) to concatenate Strings.

And on a side note, the StringBuffer is slower compared to StringBuilder because it’s a thread safe object meaning all the methods are synchronised so you need to take a decision wisely on usage based on your requirement.

Anyone associated with iOS automation on real apple devices would know the challenges it comes with. Appium is a leading automation framework, however one of the drawbacks of using Appium is that you can only launch those .ipa files on a real iPhone, which are signed with a development provisioning profile/cert, and not a distribution provisioning profile/cert which is used in the apps you download from app store. How do you get such signed native apps?

Recently we had to automate an app specific settings in the preference/settings of the iPhone. It was very important for the flow and we were completely lost. Luckily we stumbled across this small app by Budhash which used to launch the native safari on iOS. Then after some more research we found this answer in StackOverflow. It showed a way to launch settings from any app on iOS 8 onwards.

And that was it , we made some minor modifications on top of the SafariLauncher and got our own Settings Launcher. Since it was our own app we were able to sign and launch using appium and our app then launched settings which appium can control. The app is here. Feel free to use and contribute. Thanks!

Some of team members asked me how to merge only specific commits from a branch into the current branch. The reason you’d want to do this is to merge specific changes that you need immediately, leaving the other code changes you’re not interested.

First of all, use git log to see exactly which commit you want to pick or you can use the UI to identify the commit ID.

As an example:

Let’s say you’ve written some code in the commit f69eb3 of the feature branch that is very important right now. It may contain a bug fix or the code that other people need to have access to it now. Reason might be anything, you want to have commit f69eb3 in the release branch, but not the other code you’ve written in the feature branch. Here the git cherry-pick comes very handy, in this case, f69eb3 is the cherry and you want to pick it.

Below are the step by step instructions to pick one commit from feature branch to release branch.

git checkout releasegit cherry-pick f69eb3

That’s all, f69eb3 is now applied to the master branch and commited (as a new commit) in release branch. The cherry-pick behaves just like merge. If git can’t apply the changes then you will get merge conflicts. Git leaves you to resolve the conflicts manually and make the commit yourself.

In some cases picking one single commit is not enough. You may need, let’s say few consecutive commits. In this case, cherry-pick is not the right tool instead use rebase. From the previous example, you’d want commit 76f39a through b816a0 in release.

The process is to first create a new branch from feature at the last commit you want. Let’s say you want till b816a0.

git checkout -b mybranch b816a0

Next, you rebase the mybranch commit –onto master. The 76f39a^ indicates that you want to start from that specific commit.

git rebase --onto master 76f39a

The result is that commits 76f39a through b816a0 are applied to master branch.

Please note, git commit ID is a hash of both its contents and its history. So, even if you have two commits that introduce the exact same change, if they point to different parent commits, they still have different IDs. After the cherry pick, the commit in the release branch will not reflect the same commit id as it will have new commit id.